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Episode 38, Friday 7 November , 2008

Life's Little Mysteries - Episode 38

Where does the financial term ‘Dow Jones’ originate from? … asks Tamara, NSWAnswer from Geoff Hutchison:

Dow Jones was 2 men – Charles Dow and Edward Jones. They weren’t financiers or brokers. They were a couple of journalists who saw that there was a need for people to know the manner in which stock prices went up or down, to gauge the fluctuations of the market, what was hot, what was cold and over what period of time. Now around the time that we’re talking, the turn of the 20th century, it was often the case that journalists were being bribed to say nice things about company share prices to send that share price up, so they wanted to try and end any bias in the market. So they set up the Dow Jones Index of share prices and they did it on a newsletter and that newsletter became the Wall Street Journal.

Is a child more likely to suffer a speech impediment if they have bilingual parents? … asks Thuy, NSWAnswer from Kate Burridge:

Absolutely not. Children will not suffer, they will not be disadvantaged in any way — in fact quite the opposite. There are all sorts of wonderful advantages to bringing up children bilingually — all sorts of skills that are enhanced by a bilingual experience. The research is quite clear on this. Here are just a few of the benefits.

• Flexible thinking: Bilingual children understand better how language works and are better able to differentiate form from content/meaning — something that is crucial to our everyday thinking — and this is a good basis for future cognitive development, especially when it comes to flexible thinking.

• Bilingualism and reading readiness: (Note, this not restricted to children growing up bilingually — it also applies to, say, very young children who are participating in a primary school language program, such as Italian.) When you’re exposed to a new language, it teaches you about the nature of language and languages, and as literacy experts show, this is precisely the sort of knowledge that literate people need to develop.

• Linguistic awareness: Bilingual children are better able to judge grammaticality of sentences — they can understand grammatical rules, detect word boundaries more successfully than monolingual children.

From a worldwide perspective, it is also important to remember that ‘monolingual’ communities, where there's only one language used, are in fact very rare. Most children in the world grow up learning at least two languages.